The steady drumbeat of malware and spyware targeting the Android platform is continuing, this time with the emergence of a new variant of an Android Trojan that masquerades as a Google+ app and has the ability to not only record phone calls, but also to answer incoming calls and respond to remote commands that arrive via SMS.
Rep. Mary Bono Mack, chair of the influential House committee that oversees information security, is asking for more information about the Shady RAT attacks that McAfee publicized last week, saying that the “details of the report are alarming at the least,” and asking that researchers brief members of the committee.
Scareware and Rogue AV are back with a vengeance in 2011, after receding in 2010 according to Kaspersky Lab’s latest threat evolution report.
More information about last week’s “Shady Rat” hacks continues to be uncovered, including reports that the attackers behind the hack used digital images to obscure their activities.Researchers at Symantec analyzing the attacks found images were hiding code that enabled communication back and forth with infected machines and a command-and-control (C&C) server, according to a report from DarkReading.
There are remotely and easily exploitable vulnerabilities in the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that could allow an attacker to gain access to the server by simply sending a malicious image file to a user’s BlackBerry device.
Spear phishing attacks against U.S. government officials, politicians and public policy wonks are using a D.C. think tank favored by the Obama Administration as bait, according to a report from researcher Mila Parkour.
Trading on Hong Kong’s stock market, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing, remains suspended today following a “coordinated and sustained” distributed denial of service attack on one of the exchange’s websites Wednesday. Several companies, including HSBC, China Power International and Cathay Pacific found their shares unavailable late Wednesday following the attack according to a report from BBC.
The takedown of the Rustock botnet earlier this year has had ripple effects throughout the malware and spam ecosystems, with some large reductions in spam levels and attacks. However, some of the components of the malware machine driven by Rustock are beginning to come back online now. Researchers say that the Harnig pay-per-install malware is making a comeback, sans Rustock, however.
In his keynote address at the SOURCE Boston conference this year, independent security researcher Dino Dai Zovi discussed the attacker mentality and they way that defenders can adopt it to better protect their networks.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge will present evidence of what they say is wide spread manipulation of search results that direct unwitting Web surfers to dodgy and illicit online pharmacy sites.
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